Captology

Captology is the use of computers as a way to persuade users into things by behavior, motivation, usage, and language. I have never once been persuaded to post a status updat on FB, but I do find it amusing that I can catch up on the past 6 months of someone's life simply by looking at their FB posts, SMU's, photos, and info.

FB motivates users to update their statis by asking the user what they are doing, and then providing a box that can hold 140 characters to explain. According to Allen, strong persuasive techniques are tunelling and surveillance. People have a high chance of responding if there is a prompt to do so. On a weak note, FB tailors users to eachother as a way to generate SMU's.

Definitions:
Surveillance: An alarm goes off to the FB engineers that makes them act quickly to get you to update your facebook status.

Tunneling: Trying to get a person to comply easier by only giving them one question to answer.

Conditioning: FB uses scheduled reinforcement to remind users to change their statuses or face the punishment of the looming question.

Tailoring: Using algorithms, relevant updates are posted for you to see current contacts and their statuses.